Funny Story.

I've never told anyone this. Never will, either. So mum's the word, you.

About six months ago I was jumping between some Cisco routers and a Windows XP FTP server. I had several terminals for each going for days.

The Windows server was throwing errors when another system would try to delete a file by sending FTP commands directly. I got in and gave it a shot. No error, but the file remained. I couldn't remember what the 'force' flag was, so I asked:

> rm ?

It took several seconds of looking at the lack of a help file before I figured it out. Which means several terabytes of upcoming television programming got deleted. It was SO embarrassing.

Allow me to explain (and make the Cisco reference suddenly relevant):

In whatever Cisco's CLI is, if you want help on a command, you type it followed by a question mark:

> rm ?

That would tell you more about the command rm (as in 'remove,' aka delete). To get some help in a command line in Windows, you'd type this:

> rm /?

That forward slash is key. What I typed was was interpreted as "delete WHATEVER." And so it did.

(relax. I caught it before it deleted everything.)